Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. This vulnerability only impacts Discourse instances configured to use FileStore::LocalStore which means uploads and backups are stored locally on disk. If an attacker knows the name of the Discourse backup file, the attacker can trick nginx into sending the Discourse backup file with a well crafted request. This issue is patched in the latest stable, beta and tests-passed versions of Discourse. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade can either 1. Download all local backups on to another storage device, disable the enable_backups site setting and delete all backups until the site has been upgraded to pull in the fix. Or 2. Change the backup_location site setting to s3 so that backups are stored and downloaded directly from S3.
The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.
There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:
Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:
Information exposures can occur in different ways:
It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.